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Our reviewer in Tribeca…The Wolfpack (2015)

Maysa Moncao has been hitting the film festival circuit hard, this time at Tribeca. She sends back her review of The Wolfpack. Check out her Maysa Moncao LinkedIn profile for more and contact details.

Tribeca, Moviola, The Wolfpack

Big sensation among the critics at Tribeca this year was The Wolfpack, a documentary in which Crystal Moselle was lucky to have access to the complex and overwhelming story of the family Angulo.

In this family, six children of a Peruvian North American couple were raised captive in an apartment at the Lower East Side, Manhattan. They were forbidden to leave the flat.

Their mother taught them how to write and read and the only way they found to kill time was by watching movies. Their vision of the world outside was constructed through these films and it is pure voyeurism: a hole on the window a la Hitchcock and Lynch.

The kids had at home an archive of 5,000 films, among which the favourites were Reservoir Dogs, Batman, Blue Velvet and The Untouchables. It is not by chance that those selected movies express a nude violence, ironically exactly what they were been saved from on the streets. The Angulo boys would then create the props, copy the scripts ipsis literis and act with a joy you cannot measure.

The meeting between the boys and Moselle was a strange coincidence of fate. The original project was to work together in a movie, because the guys knew everything of the stories they watched and watched. Only later was Moselle told about them being captive inside their own house and that they had an immense quantity of home videos. An undeniable treasure for a documentarist.

Some of the videos were of their acting, but many were shot by their father, who wanted to have a register of their unique way of raising a family. In fact, when all came to light, the reaction of the father and the mother was sickly shocking. It is a blind attempt to escape from light and justice, which lead to their children’s freedom and coming to terms with their parenting.

The Wolfpack won the Jury award of best documentary in Sundance this year. Here the metalinguistic message is that cinema is not only a hideway, but a true redemption. Do not miss it!

Maysa Moncao

THE WOLFPACK

USA, DOCUMENTARY, 2015, 82 MIN

CINEMATOGRAPHER CRYSTAL MOSELLE

WITH MUKUNDA ANGULO, GOVINDA ANGULO, KRISNA ANGULO, SUSANNE ANGULO

ABOUT THE FILMMAKER Crystal Moselle is a New York-based director best known for her vision and dedication. Her first feature documentary, “Excavating Taylor Mead”, was part of the 2006 Whitney Biennal and on official selection for the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival.